An anti-war activists interrupts hearings on the U.S. strategy against ISIS, on Sept. 16. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

October 1, 2014

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The only thing up for grabs in the 2014 election is the Senate, and while it's probably going to be a squeaker, election analysts are now projecting that the Republicans will take control of the chamber. This is a reversal from only a couple weeks ago, when Democrats had the edge. What gives?

Democrats, particularly President Obama, are throwing this thing away with the war in Syria.

Midterm elections are typically a low-turnout affair with the victor determined by base mobilization. And committed Democrats are not feeling engaged — quantifiably there's a 15 percent gap between how many Republicans and Democrats have the election on their mind, according to Gallup.

And no wonder. What few new victories Dems have scratched from Obama's second term — new EPA regulations on coal power, for example — are working through the Byzantine rule-making process, making it nearly impossible to know how things are going. (Though to be fair ObamaCare implementation is turning out to be a huge success.) Immigration reform, the party's other major priority, is shelved indefinitely. And now we're undertaking a new pointless war in the Middle East.

Of course, that doesn't mean Republicans would be better at governing — as always, they're worse on any conceivable metric. But campaigns are usually better driven by positive enthusiasm than by wearied resentment of the other side — especially when it seems like one's own side isn't holding to important principles.

Ron Fournier, high priest of DC pundit clowns, has become a punchline for his constant sermonizing about how President Obama won't lead. But on the issue of war, it's a question worth asking (though Fournier himself naturally abandons his trolling at such a moment). When it comes to foreign policy, the president's power is effectively limitless. If Obama was committed to avoiding a new war, it's highly unlikely that the prostrate Congress would lift a finger to stop him. But instead, he seems every day more similar to his predecessor. One Democrat emailed Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall:

Speaking for myself, when the whole "we're gonna bomb ISIS" thing happened, my own thoughts / feelings were, "Great, here we go again, only this time with Obama instead of Bush." I found myself disheartened that we were once again going into an armed conflict in the Middle East which promised (literally!) to be long, which had relatively vague goals, and which left-of-center thought leaders were skeptical of (both the goals and the viability of achieving them with the plans the Obama administration laid out). [Talking Points Memo]

What seems equally clear, however, is that when this new war goes south, public opinion will sour quickly. Our history of intervening in civil wars is abysmal. We lost in Vietnam, we lost in Iraq, and Afghanistan is still on a losing trajectory. There is every reason to believe Syria will go at least as poorly as all those failures, if not worse.

I also believe that a majority of people — and Democratic voters in particular — would have responded favorably to the president trying to calm people, reminding us that ISIS is not an existential threat, and that there are limits to American power. That was Obama's greatest political strength, once. Instead we get macho swaggering that could have been copy-pasted from George W. Bush's term.